Best workflow for converting to broadcast

We are a network owned and operated TV station group using Symphony Nitris / Media Composer NLEs to create promotional content for HD broadcast at eventual 720p60 (59.94). I come to you from the mindset of a broadcast Engineer rather than as a video Editor, but I have at times worn that hat as well.

Much of the source content is still in or still comes from 480i content. Our guys shoot NTSC video at 24 fps. We have the option of either creating a 720p60 product (preferred) or creating a 480i product, either 4:3 or 16:9, and allowing our automation system to convert to 720p60. We also have Telestream FlipFactory available for transcoding if necessary.

But we are having quality issues. In particular, these issues seem to be related to deinterlacing artifacts that manifest when we use interlaced source material, including severe line-dicing artifacts on motion and sometimes jaggies on static images.

No combination of settings we have attempted seems to ameliorate these issues.

What have the rest of you done in similar situations to successfully avoid such artifacts? What are the ideal output settings for our NLEs that we should use?

We would ideally be creating an mpg or gxf product. Currently, we are using DNxHD in a mov wrapper. Our automation system will be using mxf in the near future to preserve program metadata, so we could also ideally use mxf as a wrapper as well, but the issue seems to be more codec-related than wrapper related.

Surely there are experts in the community that have solved these issues before. If you have even a clue how we might solve this, please post. TIA.

Re: Best workflow for converting to broadcast

Whenever we are working in foreign countries, we are always converting the source material before ingesting it into avid (isis) to our target video format. In our case it it 1080i50 and working in DNxHD120MBit on isis. I´m not sure if our solution will work as well with your formats, but for up/down/crossconverting we are using hardwareconverters: